Like her?
Nailed to the cross of wood?
A sweat of lust had gathered about my thighs.
To be crucified?
Was that the ambition that lurked in my heart?
The last dedication?
Life itself?
For the Order?
Why, then, had they elected me? No, not death, not that ultimate leap into nothingness. Pain, yes. Pain and more pain. But where did that lead if not to death? Death, the final pain. And if death, why not the Virgin Death?
Had she ever existed?
Our Virgin, Oakes had said. What did he mean? I lifted the black cross between my fingers. What did it mean? Why had they attached it to me like a price-ticket to a sold object? To whom could I go for advice? To Sir William? The Grand Painmaster! But he was part of the corruption! He was what I had been brought in to destroy. To whom then? Harry? But Harry, for all his intelligence and bodily beauty, was only a functionary. What could he tell me? He was absolutely cut off from the higher echelons of the Order, like Oakes. Like Sir William? Perhaps he, already corrupt, could be persuaded to give me information.
I smiled at the thought.
My own Grandmaster was at present in the cellars undergoing the same punishment as the mutinous Members! And he had not raised his voice in protest. Neither had King, who was also among the twenty, nor Duval, nor Coldstream, but those three were evidently to be trusted. That's to say, in so far as anyone in our Congregation could be trusted.
Try as I would I could not kill the little worm of discontent that wriggled deep within me. Before my election I had, as it were, been innocent, involved entirely in my personal pain and the ecstasy of my flesh. I had had no contact with intrigue, with politics; my religion was pure. I could remember loving St. Francis as a small child, but the worldly machinations of the Popes and Cardinals had held no interest for me. And here now in another Order, an Order similar in structure to that of the Roman one, I was already established within the Hierarchy. Was this, then, to be my life? Perhaps in the distant future to be elected Pain Cardinal and to have a voice in the election of Pain?
I rolled over on my soft belly on the rug and closed my eyes. There was a delicious tiredness at my limbs. It had been a strenuous day. I had emerged victorious. Time enough later to think of the small needle of discontent.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in!"
It was Harry.
"All over," he said as he walked across to the fire and sat cross-legged beside me. "Your Willie did a good job. I'm sure half the women are in love with him already."
"What about Hazel?"
"They've gone to bed together."
"Who?"
"Willie and Hazel. They make a good pair!"
I felt a small prick of jealousy, but it soon faded. What did it matter? Those innocent days could never be recaptured.
"Something worrying you?"
Harry had laid his hand on my buttocks and was caressing them gently. I turned over so that my hot hairy mound came against his hand.
"Why don't I give myself to you, Harry?"
He was slightly pale.
"Why don't you?" he said. "You know I worship you, Gertrude."
His fingers played gently with my pubic hairs and touched the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. He lifted the black cross and looked at it as he might have looked at a pocket watch.
"You're not happy," he said, looking at me intensely.
"No."
My eyes were closed. I felt his warm palm on my belly.
"You want to get away from all this?"
I laughed sadly, opening my eyes to look at him. His face was set. He was not wearing his spectacles.
"Get away?" I said softly. "What does that mean? You know there is no way out of the Order, Harry."
He did not answer.
"You think there is?"
"We could disappear," he said in a dull voice. "We could, Gertrude. We could go somewhere where they would never find us."
I laid my hand on his, causing his hand to lie heavily on my belly.
"Do you really think so, Harry? Do people like us not need the Order? Is that not why we belong to it?"
"I don't," he said obstinately. "Of course, I'm not a member of the Hierarchy. I'm simply a permanent civil servant!"
"Would you make me happy, Harry?"
"Yes, Gertrude. I think I would!"
"And if I wanted one day to be flogged to death?"
He was deathly pale.
"Could you not learn ordinary love, Gertrude? I mean, not ordinary! But a man and woman love."
"You mean ordinary love, Harry," I said gently.
He smiled hopelessly.
"Yes. That's what I mean."
"No, Harry, I'm afraid not. Don't think I don't want you just now. But afterwards. What then?"
"But the Order is not against our making love, Gertrude! And afterwards — so what? Afterwards, when we feel like it, we make love again. What else?"
"It sounds monotonous, Harry. I couldn't bear for it to become monotonous."
"But life's like that, Gertrude! What do you want? You can't burn with passion all the time. You would soon burn yourself out. Like phosphorous."
"Perhaps that's the answer," I said quietly.
"What do you mean?"
"To raise passion to such a level that life becomes extinct within it."
"But that's suicide, Gertrude!"
"I've been thinking, Harry."
"What about?"
"About the Virgin Death. Do you know anything about that?"
"Of course. She symbolizes the infinite lust for Pain, to the point of death."
"Did she exist?"
"Oh, lots of people have died under flagellation," he said evasively. "We had a stockbroker ourselves who went out with a heart attack during a flogging."
"Yes, but it's not the same, Harry. This woman mounted the cross to die. She knew she was going to die. She demanded it. Did she exist?"
"I suppose from the official standpoint she did. But we're living in the twentieth century, Gertrude. It's a relative age. People don't have the same lust for the infinite, or if they do, they're mad. What's the point? Men like to be flogged or to flog. But to the point of death, that's another thing."
"But that's just the point, Harry. You know the point at which one screams out of control, the point at which one is simply a helpless victim of the thongs? That is dying, Harry, when one no longer has the power of will. You are suspended in Pain; you no longer wish for it to go on or to stop. You become Pain. If someone were to drive a knife into your heart at that moment, you wouldn't feel it; it would be like turning off the light, that's all. Normally, when you don't die, you come back through Pain to yourself, and it is you who is painful, your own aching flesh. And there's nothing in that; it's simply painful. The triumph is in the rising beyond the painful into Pain. Once that leap out of the self has been made, it is an anticlimax to go back. That's like ordinary lust which goes on and on. You come to the climax and then everything is shattered. You are yourself again, alone, just as you were before. And it goes on and on and on. Until we feel like it again, you said a moment ago. But that's monotonous, Harry. And it's the same with flagellation. Only with flagellation there's no excuse. It's sheer cowardice to come back. Only that person is admirable, only that person is truly religious, who has the courage not to come back. What for, after all? To do it all over again?"
"All right," Harry said in a tired voice, "so you choose to die because you find life monotonous, because it goes on and on with the same rising and falling, the same thrills which are provoked and which come to an end. But that is what living is, Gertrude, and I don't see why one should expect it to be anything else. For me the courageous thing to do is to come to terms with what you call monotony, that's to say, with reality, to accept it, and intelligently to alter it to one's best advantage. Your way out is sheer Nihilism, and there's a strong core of Nihilism in all the religions. You call life meaningless, and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other. And the application of the words meaningful or purpose to life in the abstract is itself meaningless. All meanings and purposes are men's meanings and purposes; men choose them, often courageously, and then living is easier. But it is the living that counts. Death is nothing; it is simply the point at which there is no more possibility. It may or may not be courageous to court death, but for me, it's insane."